Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

I feel like I'm drowning. Every night, I'm carrying home loads of things to read but I'm too exhausted. I keep clipping things and Xeroxing them and planning to read them eventually, but I just end up throwing it all away and feeling guilty.

- Levine, Ghita

Best Quotes about Books - reading

Don't just read the easy stuff. You may be entertained by it, but you will never grow from it.

Rohn, Jim

What gunpowder did for war the printing press has done for the mind.

Phillips, Wendell

You can either read something many times in order to be assured that you got it all, or else you can define your purpose and use techniques which will assure that you have met it and gotten what you need.

Kump, Peter

You will, I am sure, agree with me that... if page 534 only finds us in the second chapter, the length of the first one must have been really intolerable.

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan

A great book should leave you with many experiences and slightly exhausted at the end. You should live several lives while reading it.

Styron, William

A book may be compared to your neighbor: if it be good, it cannot last too long; if bad, you cannot get rid of it too early.

Brooke, Rupert

An empty book is like an infant's soul, in which anything may be written. It is capable of all things, but containeth nothing. I have a mind to fill this with profitable wonders.

Traherne, Thomas

No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.

Townsend, Atwood H.

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

10.

Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading, an easy prey to sensations and cheap appeals.

Trevelyan, G. M.

11.

Levine, Ghita

12.

This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty... what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing.

Miller, Henry

13.

Here, my dear Lucy, hide these books. Quick, quick! Fling Peregrine Pickle under the toilette --throw Roderick Random into the closet --put The Innocent Adultery into The Whole Duty of Man; thrust Lord Aimworth under the sofa! cram Ovid behind the bolster; there --put The Man of Feeling into your pocket. Now for them.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

14.

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.

Lowell, James Russell

15.

The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything.

Whitman, Walt

16.

Books are divided into two classes, the books of the hour and the books of all time.

Ruskin, John

17.

If a secret history of books could be written, and the author's private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!

Thackeray, William M.

18.

It does not follow because many books are written by persons born in America that there exists an American literature. Books which imitate or represent the thoughts and life of Europe do not constitute an American literature. Before such can exist, an original idea must animate this nation and fresh currents of life must call into life fresh thoughts along the shore.

Fuller, Margaret

19.

When the book comes out it may hurt you -- but in order for me to do it, it had to hurt me first. I can only tell you about yourself as much as I can face about myself.

Baldwin, James

20.

The reading of all good books is like a conversation with all the finest men of past centuries.

Descartes, Rene

21.

Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever.

Swartz, J.

22.

Old books that have ceased to be of service should no more be abandoned than should old friends who have ceased to give pleasure.

Worsthorne, Sir Peregrine

23.

Do we write books so that they shall merely be read? Don't we also write them for employment in the household? For one that is read from start to finish, thousands are leafed through, other thousands lie motionless, others are jammed against mouseholes, thrown at rats, others are stood on, sat on, drummed on, have gingerbread baked on them or are used to light pipes.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

24.

Without books the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are the engines of change, windows on the world, Lighthouses as the poet said erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind, Books are humanity in print.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

25.

I love to lose myself in other men's minds. When I am not walking, I am reading. I cannot sit and think; books think for me.

Lamb, Charles

26.

Book love... is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures.

Trollope, Anthony

27.

Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.

Penn, William

28.

A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public with his pants down.

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

29.

I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.

Gissing, George Robert

30.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

31.

Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman other or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader.

Eagleton, Terry

32.

A good title is the title of a successful book.

Chandler, Raymond

33.

Once we have learned to read, meaning of words can somehow register without consciousness.

Marcel, Anthony

34.

You've really got to start hitting the books because it's no joke out here.

Lee, Spike

35.

I read the newspaper avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.

Bevan, Aneurin

36.

Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason: they made no such demand upon those who wrote them. Those works, therefore, are the most valuable, that set our thinking faculties in the fullest operation. understand them.

Clarendon

37.

In science, read by preference the newest works. In literature, read the oldest. The classics are always modern.

Lytton, Lord Edward

38.

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

Mallarme, Stephane

39.

Reading the Scriptures is an uplifting experience.

40.

No furniture is so charming as books.

Smith, Sydney

41.

Then I though of reading -- the nice and subtle happiness of reading ... this joy not dulled by age, this polite and unpunishable vice, this selfish, serene, lifelong intoxication.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

42.

Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.

Rochman, Hazel

43.

The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.

Brookner, Anita

44.

Except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book! a message to us from the dead -- from human souls we never saw, who lived, perhaps, thousands of miles away. And yet these, in those little sheets of paper, speak to us, arouse us, terrify us, teach us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers.

Kingsley, Charles

45.

God be thanked for books; they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages.

Channing, William Ellery

46.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

Kieran, John

47.

Read Homer once, and you can read no more. For all books else appear so mean, and so poor. Verse will seem prose; but still persist to read, and Homer will be all the books you need.

Buckingham, Duke of

48.

All the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books.

Voltaire

49.

A person of mature years and ripe development, who is expecting nothing from literature but the corroboration and renewal of past ideas, may find satisfaction in a lucidity so complete as to occasion no imaginative excitement, but young and ambitious students are not content with it. They seek the excitement because they are capable of the growth that it accompanies.

Cooley, Charles Horton

50.

The novel can't compete with cars, the movies, television, and liquor. A guy who's had a good feed and tanked up on good wine gives his old lady a kiss after supper and his day is over. Finished.

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand